SUICIDE IN GERMANY

Gisborne Times, 13 October 1932, Page 2

SUICIDE IN GERMANY

ACTION BY LIFE INSURANCE COMPANIES.

German life insurance companies have finally been driven to take defensive action against losses in the recent great increase of suicides among persons holding life policies, states the "San Francisco Chronicle.” Hereafter the principal companies will include in their policies provisions making it difficult- or impossible for a person wilfully to use his o wn death as a means for bestowing riches upon his family. Before the worst days of the depression, the companies paid off policies without cavil when the insured met death through suicide. A period of one or two years between the time when the policy was taken out and the time of the death sufficed to make the policy valid. Now several of the companies have extended this period greatly, and others propose not to pay any premiums for wilful death. Among the holders of the larger life policies there were in 1931 four times as many deaths by suicide as in 1929- Wealthy men runied by present business conditions are finding suicide one way out of their -troubles. Self-destruction enables them to make handsome provision for families that, accustomed to a high standard of living, would otherwise have to face poverty. One difficulty that will be encountered by insurance companies in their new resolution will be the matter of definition of the suicide’s motives. Medical authorities are agreed that suicide is ca,rricd out in an abnormal state of mind. Exactly when such abnormality reaches irresponsibility and when it remains within the realm of conscious, intelligent design cannot easily be determined. Yet- upon such definition German insurance men admit, willbang the problem of whether each suicide’s policy is valid of not.